Young Adult is plain immature

When Juno came out in 2007, the world fell in love with stars Ellen Page and Michael Cera. The general consensus was that director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody could do no wrong either. After all, Reitman had already been at the helm of the wonderfully satirical Thank You For Smoking.

Two years after Juno, unfortunately, they went separate ways, with Reitman directing the misfired Up in the Air with George Clooney, while Cody scribed Jennifer’s Body, a high school horror that was entirely dumb but should have been much, much smarter.

And now, here we are at the end of 2011, and they have teamed up again. Don’t expect your heart to be warmed up like it was by the quirky story of the pregnant teen four years ago. Young Adult is an otherwise unpleasant look at an immature woman in her 30s. Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) used to think that she was the most successful one out of all of her high school classmates, especially because she moved away from home and became a ghostwriter for an author with a popular series of young-adult fiction novels.

But times change and her recent divorce has shaken her sense of self-worth and validation. The world of Internet dating just doesn’t cut it either. She needs to find that one true love again and, in a moment of temporarily lacking reason or restraint, her thoughts go straight back to her high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). So she heads back to the old hometown.

Of course even the most perfectly laid plans have a few wrinkles, and this plan wasn’t perfect from the beginning. Slade is happily married with a new baby. Gary, on the other hand, is an emotional wreck who drinks diet Coke for breakfast and every other meal comes out of hard liquor bottles.

It’s a good thing that one of the first people that she bumps into (at the bar, naturally) is Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt). They too were in high school together but he had to grow up fast after a vicious beating as a teenager left him physically and psychologically scarred. He exists to provide Gary a lot of much-needed perspective on her life and her romantic pursuits. Insightfully, he tells her that she shouldn’t try to hook up with Slade.

This beautifully understated film should have gone a lot farther in its exploration of who Gary is and what makes her tick. Also, it should have given her some kind of a character arc. Instead, what we are given is a one note movie that takes 10 minutes for the change in scenery from Minneapolis to Smalltown, USA and then takes another 84 minutes to go absolutely nowhere. It leaves you still waiting for something to happen even as the end credits start to roll.

Young Adult tries to be clever but only comes out with a few interesting lines and a fairly obvious storytelling technique of using the main character’s own fictional writings to describe the thoughts and feelings about her own life. It’s a facile tool in an overwhelmingly superficial movie. We don’t ever get to really care for Gary, and Slade is portrayed as a kind of pretty boy who grew up but didn’t become anything more than a small thinker.

The only one that we really root for is Freehauf but he ends up being a minor character. Gary leaves town without even saying good-bye to him, thus depriving the audience of the pleasure of his presence one last time.

Young Adult comes to theatres with a lot of promise but winds up being a disappointment. Although it already had a relatively low production budget ($12 million), it would have been so much better as an independent film made with unknowns and put together with less than $1 million. It should have been a character drama but turns out to be a tragedy.